Coca-Cola is working to infuse cannabis extract into its drinks for medicinal benefits. Heineken, meanwhile, has a craft beer brewed with the toxic ingredient that induces a high.
Coca-Cola is working on a cannabis version of the drink. Heinegen’s craft beer can make you high.
To provide background for those of you who don’t smoke pot, there are two main ingredients in cannabis (or marijuana): CBD and THC. The former doesn’t get you high, instead providing all the benefits such as reducing pain and inflammation. It’s the reason many jurisdictions are legalizing marijuana now or considering.
THC, on the other hand, is the compound that gets you high and hallucinating. It’s the reason marijuana is illegal in the first place.
In other words, if you’re a pothead, THC is why you smoke pot; CBD is the reason you tell others why you smoke pot.
Many beverage companies, including Coca-Cola, are trying to get into the wellness drinks market believed to be worth tens of billions of dollars, by infusing the healthily beneficial CBD into their drinks. It is still mostly a preparation stance at this point, though, since marijuana is not yet legalized at federal level in the U.S., the main target market.
On the other hand, Heineken has a craft beer brand, Lagunitas, that has been infusing THC into its drinks and selling them in California. Legally, of course, since the state allows marijuana.
I see an interesting parable in this. It reminds me of a few things simultaneously.
1. Irvins Salted Egg
If you’re marketing on a positive benefit (e.g. “it’s good for your health!”), you’d better have the authority behind you. And that tends to require WAITING for the authority to come on board. But if you’re marketing on a ‘negative’ benefit, your hands are ‘tied’ and you have to disclose and disclaim. Like “Warning: This WILL Get You High!”
Kinda like Irvins Salted Egg snacks that warn on the label: “Dangerously Addictive!” Good stuff.
2. Breakthrough Copywriting
The book says:
You want to make an emotionally compelling case… The one response you don’t want to get is, “Interesting idea. That’s really good copy. You write well.” The response you want to get is either “We’re going to get one of those,” or “You can’t do that!” You want to get them one way or the other. You want to get a negative reaction from the people your offer is not right for, and a positive reaction from the people who it is right for. That is what an emotionally compelling case does.
It certainly feels like Heineken’s approach to marijuana-infused drinks invokes a lot of “We’re gonna get one of those” and “You can’t do that!”
3. Thinking in Bets
Another book. This one, poker champion turned management consultant Annie Duke preaches exactly what the title says. Most things in real-life decision-making hinges upon certain future. And the future is always uncertain. When every decision is viewed as a bet, oftentimes the smart move is to not engage in one. In this example, will the health benefits be enough to warrant a legal endorsement? Maybe, eventually. But why not remove the dependency altogether and promote the health risk?
So where’s the theme Productivity, Creativity, and Expression in this?
For one thing, this post isn’t necessarily about – or not about – getting creative from smoking pot; I don’t make judgment! But it certainly has something to do with productivity in making decisions in bets, because it tends to make you avoid taking sides. Since eventualities take time to unfold, taking sides can paralyze you in the mean time – like Coca-Cola and other brands do currently. If you take an option that removes the bet, then you don’t have to wait, and can act now. Heineken’s Lagunitas has been able to sell its cannabis-infused products because it chose a positioning that doesn’t depend on the legality of adding CBD to your drinks.
There’s also a lot to do with expression. Effective expression is where some folks will be necessarily alienated, so that the target audience feels exclusive. If you write for everyone, you write for no one. If you speak to everyone, no one hears. If you try to please everyone, no one is pleased. Instead, pick someone. Address them at the expense of alienating everyone else.
A lottery merchant told a story that someone had bought lotteries at his stand that ended up winning 90 million baht. The patron, a regular, left the lotteries with the merchant. But the merchant was an honest man and brought the winning to the rightful winner.
Business was booming immediately for him. On one of the early good days, all of a sudden the famous graphologist came to pay a visit, to commend the merchant for his honesty, give a calligraph that spells “rich,” and pronounce the location of the lottery stand was auspicious. All was good.
Except…the whole thing was bogus. A PR stunt. And merely a week had passed by before he was found out as a sham.
And now, the social media table turned on the famous graphologist. He’s been hiding from limelight.
This story rings close to home for me, because, just days before this news broke, and my girlfriend, along with three other lady friends, had contacted this very graphologist to design their signatures for them (for a price). He’d asked them for their names, dates of birth, et cetera et cetera. I’ve got the pictures of the signatures he invented for them (though I’m not allowed to show them here) – they all looked uncannily similar to one another to me. Nevertheless, the ladies have all been practicing signing their new signatures to perfection.
A lot of people believe that signature, and handwriting, reveal a lot about the owner. The characters and the state of mind, at the very least. The future, but that’s a stretch. And this is found not only in the old and the classics either, but also in the new. I was amazed to see this one ‘analysis’ of the signatures of famous tech people. Jobs. Gates. Bezos. Dell. I wonder what it would say about Travis Kalanick. :p
Sherlock Holmes supposedly has unnatural ability to identify different handwritings and what they imply about each of their respective owner.
In the old and the classics, graphology is of course featured prominently in detective stories. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is a true believer of the art (or..science?) himself. He describes Sherlock Holmes with unnatural ability to interpret handwriting. Holmes supposedly can tell the gender and the character of the writer. He can compare two samples, and not only tell if they are by different persons, and whether they are related! (For prominent cases featuring this mad skill of his, check out The Reigate Squires and The Norwood Builder.)
All wonders Holmes could perform with mere handwriting are too good to be true, except one. Signature and handwriting verification is performed all the time, even in modern days, as a forensic measure. True, it’s not an infallible measure, as both signature and handwriting can be forged well with a skillful con artist. In this sense, Holmes was lucky, and not because the skills of the con artists supposedly improved over time.
I’ve had to forge my parents’ signatures a few times, friends’ handwritings at least once, for a prank. I did not do a good job. It was hard, but not impossible. What’s impossible is to forge well and with speed too. And that is where I think the modern-day real-world counterparts of Holmes are having a tough time. Back in the old days, pens were fountain and feathered quill; slow strokes would have blotched ink on the paper. Today, with all the ball-point pens, forgers can take time to mimic similarity in the outcome only.
Coming back to what your signature reveals about you, one thing that I think might be worthwhile to explore is to think back to when you invented your signature. Why do you sign it the way you do now? Any story behind that? To get started, here’s my story.
I was obsessed with money when I was younger. Back in high school, someone told me a Chinese superstition that in order to have a lot of money, my signature had better begin with a pouch. A money pouch. Open up, so that it can keep money. For both first name and last name.
Not an ounce of artistic creativity in me, I found the requirements difficult to try to fit into my full-name signature. So I went up to this buddy of mine, a band drummer who later became an architect. (Some traits show since young age.) When he heard my needs, he said “easy peasy,” and just invented one for me right there. It looked amazingly good and simple (enough for me to replicate). So I took it and practiced and still sign it till this day.
Later when I was going abroad, I had to sign in English. I’d shaken off that Chinese superstition by then, but not the obsession with money. So I invented my own English signature…with a big $ in it!
At least, not in the way you and I often draw it, according to Gartner.
The S-Curve model is broken. But what does that mean?
Gartner, the world’s best reference for strategy and market research to IT solutions, has two famous tools: the Magic Quadrant and the Hype Cycle. The lesser known of the two, the Hype Cycle describes, as the name suggests, when something gets into a hype, the subsequent disillusionment, and the afterlife post wake-up call.
Gartner’s famous Hype Cycle
I have known the Hype Cycle for a while now. But I have never seen it applied in a way that makes this clear sense to me, until Gartner’s Southeast Asia Partner (I haven’t asked for permission to use his name – let’s call him John) came in to my office last week to discuss his firm’s take on blockchain. All you need to know about blockchain is it’s in a hype right now. For those of you who are not in tech, if you hear the word ‘blockchain’ more than a couple times in the past week, that’s the sign. Almost no need for Gartner’s famous graph.
Back in May, when I attended a big IBM event in Singapore. Every corner of the hall was draped in A.I. and Blockchain. I remember reflecting sadly that, just a couple years earlier, such events had been all Big Data, and I had been having to defend my existence in a Small Data career. Boy how things have changed.
What John put in perspective for me is that the Hype Cycle is actually part of the larger, presumed S-curve of technology adoption. The actual S shape never happens, because without a hype, new technology won’t gather critical mass and climb past the inflection point. I’d never thought of that.
The Hype Cycle is actually part of the larger, presumed S-curve.
Now, with this picture in mind, another concept comes into clearer focus. Bill Gates said, “We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten.” If we listen to Bill Gates – and why wouldn’t we? He is nerd smart, and sat atop the tech world for over two decades (& likely still does), seeing technologies come and go with much understanding than you & me. If we take his words for it, then a time scale emerge where we can make sense of the Hype-S.
“We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten.”
– Bill Gates
Short-term tech “hype” could lead to long-term adoption.
If a piece of technology receives no hype right now, don’t bother with it. Remember, no chance of gaining wide adoption without a hype. Once it receives a hype, it’s safe to sit back and wait for a couple years at least. When the hype dials down, we can then evaluate which implementer / implementation / use case of the technology delivers promising value.
Part of being productive is knowing where to direct your attention and limited resources and energy. I hope this tool can help you be more productive in this noisy world of new technologies.
This blog is written with three specific areas of focus in mind: productivity, creativity, and expression.
First off, a background story. In preparing to write this blog, I took a quick survey of the 50 most popular blogs from Thailand. Here’s what I found:
1. 20.5 of them are in English, the rest in Thai. The 0.5 comes from when a blog is written in both languages, I count them half English, half Thai.
2. The English blogs are almost all about food and travel, which is understandable given that’s what Thailand is famous for.
So at the risk of being under-discovered, I decided to write this blog in English, even though they aren’t about food or travel (one of which, by the way, I’m nuts about). That is because I believe that interest in the three topics I’m going to cover transpires across cultures and regions. Everybody wants to do more with less. (I have yet to come across anyone who says “Geez, I wish I work harder and get less done!”) Most of us aspire to be creative; at least, we often feel inspired in the presence of creative work. And we all struggle to communicate, to express what we mean, how we think, who we are and what we feel.
If my readers can get a little bit better in any of these areas, I consider my work here worthwhile.
From time to time, the discussion may seem to veer off path a little bit. But I assure you it will still belong to the theme, just in a broader perspective. For example, productivity isn’t confined in a personal space – many management tasks in a corporate setting involve making teamwork more productive. So Peter Drucker’s type preaches are fair game here too.
Similarly, examples of creativity at times may seem techy rather than artsy (which is what many of us think when we hear the word “creative”), but they no less belong in the realm. When Steve Jobs demanded that rectangular windows in the early-day Macintosh have round edges, it was impossibly problematic, because the task involves taking a square root, which the Macintosh back in those days didn’t support. (It performed poorly even at multiplication and division, let alone taking a square root.) Apple’s engineers eventually divined a superfast way of taking a square root of a number using only addition and subtraction, and RoundRects was born! That was creative and genius!
Expression has most to do with bringing what’s in your head out to the real world to create impact. It may do with uttered voice in public, but it may also do with lines on a piece of paper and computer graphics rendered 3D. It’s a broad theme in fact; anything to do with connecting what’s in your head with what other people can see, hear or read is fair game.
And finally, the three topics are all very much related. As Dawson Trotman, the founder of the Navigators, said, “Thoughts disentangle themselves when they pass through the lips and fingertips.”
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